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Projec64 has had an interesting history. It first came out of nowhere, purely as an experiment for developers zilmar and Jabo, yet it quickly revolutionized the N64 emulation landscape. For many years afterwards, it was considered to be the best N64 emulator, with only Mupen64 and 1964 posing any real competition. By version 1.6, it was touted as being not only highly compatible, but also the most stable of the lot.

However, upon announcing the development of version 1.7, the project became closed off to most of the public. The only way to keep up with the latest developments was to donate $20 to obtain beta testing privileges. However, there were several development version leaks, most of which turned out to be unstable, prone to crashes, and full of performance and compatibility regressions, which cast doubt upon the competency of the developers. Upon Jabo's departure from the project in 2011, most people came to regard Projec64 as being stuck in development limbo, if not completely dead.

In 2013, however, zilmar, now the lone developer of Project64, released version 2.0, including its source code. Quickly afterwards, version 2.1 was released. However, these versions proved to be a mixed bag in comparison to the older, long-standing 1.6 release, and even the leaked 1.7 betas in some respects. Several compatibility issues were fixed, and the interface was cleaned up, but the default plugins were largely inferior to earlier iterations, and even the core itself saw compatibility regressions in some games. Worse still, several games suffer from timing issues not present in earlier versions. After the source was made Public, the code was uploaded to GitHub, where Zilmar maintains and accepts pull requests and bug reports - Link

In the end, there is still some worth to Project64, as it still plays some games better than any other emulator, but for the most part, it would seem Mupen64Plus has surpassed it in a general sense.